We'd talked about meeting in mid-March, but by the end of January, I was beginning to have serious doubts. His e-mails came less frequently. The messages he left on my answering machine sounded distant and forced. The package never arrived. When I asked him about the trip, he said that he should be saving money ... but how did I feel about it?

Since it didn't look like we would be going to Reykjavik, I proposed we meet in New York -- he had business there and I wanted to visit a friend. A week later he wrote back and said New York was a "very good plan," but he mentioned there were a lot of other people he wanted to see, and that he would probably stay with his friend's parents. Obviously, he didn't want to spend a romantic weekend alone with me, but he also wouldn't say he didn't want to see me. I began to feel like I was talking to the fog. Another week went by and just moments before I pronounced my millennium romance dead, he called and asked me if I could come to New York.

It was seven weeks after I'd met him. I went because I wanted to know what had happened. It was clear I wasn't going to find out over the phone. A simple explanation would do. If he had a girlfriend, fine; if he was married, okay; if he'd just gotten home and realized it would never work between us, all he had to do was say so. Even if he couldn't put it into words, I thought that by seeing him in person, I would be able to explain to myself what had happened to the man I'd met in Baja.

In the four days I was in New York, I saw Patrick for a little over an hour. We met at a Ukranian breakfast place on the lower East Side. We both arrived late. He came in after me, wearing glasses, a gray sweater and a beige overcoat, carrying the Sunday New York Times. He smiled when he saw me, but looked removed and closed. He skin was pale and his eyes light, light blue -- almost gray. The exuberance and emotion I'd seen in Baja seemed to be lost under the layers of wool. The glowing Irish prince had been replaced by a pallid, European bureaucrat.

I felt nauseous as we glanced over the menus. I didn't know how to act. There were so many things I wanted to say, but I somehow knew he was already gone, resolved in whatever decisions he had made in the weeks since I'd seen him.

"The first thing I want to say," he began, "is that I feel very guilty about not being able to spend more time with you this weekend. There are just so many people in town right now, it's my best friend's 30th birthday...." Guilty? What was the point of guilt?

"The second thing I want to say is that meeting you has changed my life." I stared at him across the table. "Since I met you I've been doing so many things differently.... You've really been a catalyst. I know you won't be able to understand the extent of what I'm saying, but..." There was no explanation beyond this and I was unwilling to try to get him to say more. I sipped the burnt, bitter coffee and focused on the bold print on the front page of the newspaper.

He made some vague reference about feeling that we would see each other again, but I let the comment slide over me without impact. I knew, for whatever reasons, that our relationship could not survive the world we had tried to drag it into. The conditions which had allowed us to experience immediate and comfortable intimacy were gone. Now we were just two people who didn't know each other very well, sitting together in a restaurant. "It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal," Dinesen reflects, "which had radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the iguana was as dead as a sandbag."

We walked together a few blocks to where he would catch the subway and I would head to a bookstore. We stood there in the street and hugged each other for a long time. I ran my hand through the back of his dark, curly hair -- something I had wanted to do regardless of what happened. I started walking down the street and when I turned around, he was already gone. In what direction, I did not know.

I never heard from him again.

I suppose it should be said that there are travel romances that survive and thrive in the real world. I know a woman who took pity on a sick Brit she met at a train station in Inner Mongolia -- they're getting married in the States this summer. Dinesen shot many creatures on her safaris, the majority of which yielded fine skins and stuffed well. But in an attempt to avoid future heartbreak, she offers this advice: "In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead."

Unfortunately, in the case of human beings, there is no guidebook to consult, no road map to follow. You can only follow your impulse for beauty, and pray that the splendor remains.

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